Category: Comics

July 25, 2009

I ended up spending most of the day in the gigantic Hall H watching Hollywood previews after I discovered that even the panel for The Guild was full. When a video podcast in the morning is full, you can tell what sort of day it's going to be.

I got into Hall H a little late for the Warner Bros event -- big thanks to littlestar, who called me just in time to let me know that she was several rows ahead in the same line. I also went to the spotlight on Kazu, where he talked about quitting his job and managing to make the first Flight and Daisy Kutter while living off of $15K in savings. Flight came out around the first time I went to Comic-Con, and it's amazing to see how it's evolved into a full-fledged mini-studio of its own.

My gut reactions to the various movies/panels:

Warner Bro:

Sherlock Holmes: I have to say, Robert Downey Jr.'s self-aware narcissism shtick still works, and the movie looks really good. They showed us a montage of clips instead of a scene, so I hope that they still leave a little bit of sleuthing in between the fisticuffs.

Jonah Hex: could be entertaining, though Josh Brolin doesn't fully inspire me as the anti-hero Western gunslinger. Megan Fox seemed to have an uncontrollable urge to lick her lips and toss her hair the entire panel. They were fairly proud of how much they did on so little of a budget, and the Merrimac-style ship in the previews did look pretty cool.

The Box: Might have been interesting. A man shows up with a box to a home in Northern Virginia in 1976, presents housewife with a box with an offer: press the button, and someone you don't know dies, and you get a million dollars. It's based on a short story by Richard Matheson. The "might" comes from the fact that it sounds like Cameron Diaz gave away the entire third act, and the fact that Cameron Diaz is the star.

Disney:

Ponyo!: Miyazaki was, as expected, curt with his translated responses to translated questions, but the epic sea storm sequence that they showed us was an amazing feat. This is going to be a strange, strange film, but I'm excited to see it, even if just to watch that sea sequence again.

Princess and the Frog: this is an attempt to re-Disney Disney. Having a black female lead, even in frog form, is a move forward, but it feels like it might get bogged down in the tropes of trying to be a "Disney" film, yet new at the same time.

Beauty and the Beast 3D: Gimmick. While the ballroom scene was probably the inspiration for doing this, the 2D animation with faux-3D just gave a jerky effect to my eyes and was a distraction.

Toy Story 1 and 2 3D: Not gimmick. We saw the opening sequence to Toy Story 2 was awesome in 3D. The movies are identical, just re-rendered in 3D. I'm not sure about the wisdom of requiring audiences to sit through a double feature, but it is two for the price of one, so you could always go twice.

Toy Story 3: Michael Keaton as the Ken doll might just make this movie -- they showed a short 'interview' with Ken that was hilarious. The movie itself will take place when Andy leaves for college.

Prep and Landing: this is a special that Disney/Pixar will be running on ABC for the Christmas holidays. It features and elite team of elves that is the advance team for Santa. I wont' give away the gags, but it had the audience rolling. I'll definitely setup the TiVo for this one.

Side note: Studio Ghibli, I realized, is the opposite of Pixar. Female lead characters, hand animation, and no sequels...

November 13, 2007

Marvel is doing a great service to its fans by releasing 2500 back issues online so readers can catch up on important origin stories and other character development arc. They won't be releasing current content in the same manner, but they will be adding 20 back issues each week to keep you coming back for more. They seem to have hit a snag, however, as the current Marvel.com Web site reads:

Hey, True Believers, the response to Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited has been so overwhelming, we're just doing a bit of routine maintenance to make sure you have a great experience! We'll be back shortly. Thank you, Marvel.com.

September 28, 2004

I'm already hooked now that I read Stan Sakai's Usagi Step-by-Step Handout. There are also study guides for Maus, Watchmen, and Ghost World among others, which reminds me that I need to add all three of those to my reading backlog shelf. There's not too much original material on the site, but there's more than enough for someone like me who has no drawing/writing talent.

May 21, 2004

Up until PARC spun out of Xerox, there was this insistence that everything was a 'document,' from what you print to e-mail to just about anything with text in it, and many of the area names at PARC used the word 'document.' As soon as we spun out there was a great rush to rename any group that had the word 'document' in it.

March 20, 2004

Issue 8 will be upon us soon, so to help myself be prepared, I've collected links to all the various issues annotations out there. Jason Pomerantz appears to be the only person to have completed annotations all the way through, but Julian Darius' and Jess Nevins' both had very strong efforts for the earlier issues;

October 8, 2003

After criticizing Vol 1 of the series, I felt that I should write an entry for X-Treme X-Men Vol 4, which collects the Mekanix #1-6 story. This storyline takes us away from X-Treme X-Men ensemble and tells the story of Shadowcat, ex-X-Man. After leaving the X-Men, she has decided to enroll in college. There she must deal with the fallout of the destruction of Genosha, rampant mutant discrimination on campus, and the threat of new and improved sentinel bots.

This story is not your typical X-Men formula of "lets get together and fight the super villain and/or super group." Rather, it focuses on a single individual, stripped of her uniform, and forced to confront the bigotry directly (instead of its usual place as a backdrop to an X-Men story). I liked this approach a lot and I thought that it made for a better story. You usually don't read an X-Men story where the character visits her shrink, or spends her night bartending, and it serves to take the character out of the fantasy "Xavier school of gifted children" and place her into a slightly more real campus setting that college students can better relate to.

X-Treme X-Men Vol. 1 was a real letdown. I could barely get through it. The pace of the story is painfully slow and the artwork does a terrible job of telling it. I had to re-read several pages multiple times because it was unclear if what in the world is supposed to be going on. There are constant cuts forwards and backwards in time and between different story arcs, and there are climactic points in the story where I'm still not entirely sure what exactly occurred. The one interesting part of the story -- the Libris Veritatus (The Book of Truth) -- is given a weak spotlight. I guess they wanted to maintain it for future story arcs, but it comes at the cost of making the first nine issues flat.

August 31, 2003

If you're in agony waiting for 1602 #2, then you can spend your time reading Jess Nevins' Annotated 1602 for issue 1, where nearly every line and panel are dissected. Kids - if you want to use a comic for a book report, this would be a great choice. There's such an absurd amount of historical detail in just a single issue that you could write multiple papers.

August 13, 2003

I bought a copy of Youngblood: Bloodsport and Youngblood: Genesis at Comic-Con, partly out of nostalgia (I had stopped collecting comics in 1992/3, just as Image Comics was stirring things up), and also out of respect for Eric and Chad Walker (www.walkerboystudio.com), who were working their butts off at the booth drawing really cool drawings for anyone who asked.

Youngblood: Genesis (art by the Walker bros) was pretty much as I expected, nothing spectacular, but not a disappointment. Youngblood: Bloodsport, however, is definitely the worst comic book I have read. If I have read worse, the bad taste of this one has washed those memories away. I think Liefeld has actually become worse as an artist - some parts of the pages looked like he decided inking was too much effort and xeroxed the pencils instead.

The most terrible part, though - if you can believe it - wasn't even Liefeld's fault. Millar's story reeks. The dialogue was not nearly as clever as it thought it was, and the story feels like they pasted a bad parody on top of the first couple chapters of Takami's Battle Royale (I assume issue 2 will tackle the next couple of chapters). I had to glance at the cover several times to confirm that it was in fact Millar that wrote the script, because I couldn't reconcile this with the Millar who actually wrote some stories I liked. There was one funny bit with third rate superheroes jumping in and taking credit for stopping the bad guys, but alas, I've already spared too many words for the worst comic...ever.

Here's a link to a comic about the recent Castillo case where a retailer was convicted of selling an adult comic to an adult in Dallas. To add to the silliness, the prosecution never even proved that the comic was obscene by legal standards.

I've only linked to the comic teaser as I don't want to deprive Salon of it's advertising revenue. (via Neil Gaiman)

August 5, 2003

Now that the Supreme Court has refused to hear the case, it is now established Texas legal precedent: you can now be sentenced to half a year in jail for selling adult comics to ... adults. To quote the prosecution's closing argument:

I don't care what type of evidence or what type of testimony is out there, use your rationality, use your common sense. Comic books, traditionally what we think of, are for kids